Thomas Moore was the most popular poet of his day. His “Irish Melodies,” arranged and sung to traditional tunes, were translated into many languages and won him international fame. He was particularly dear to the hearts of Irish Americans and a million and a half copies of the music for “The Last Rose of Summer” were sold in the United States alone. James Flannery gives us an in-depth look at Ireland’s best-loved minstrel.
Poet, musician, singer, wit, polemicist, journalist, biographer and letter-writer, Thomas Moore (May 28, 1779 – February 25,1852) was one of the most brilliant figures of the Regency as well as the first internationally noted man of letters identified with Ireland. In his lifetime Moore knew the heights of fame not only in England and his native Ireland, but in America and throughout Europe where, along with Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott, he was the embodiment of English Romanticism.
Moore’s lasting reputation rests with ten immensely popular volumes of folk-song arrangements published as the Irish Melodies between 1808 and 1834. Like Robert Burns of Scotland, he was primarily a lyricist who took traditional airs then just beginning to be collected and provided them with new words in English. In doing so Moore not only displayed a poetic genius of his own but, for someone who knew little Irish, was amazingly faithful to the feeling and texture of the original sources.
Down through the centuries the sense of a distinctive Irish culture had been preserved by the bardic order of poets and harpers that held an honored place in the assemblies of their chieftains. So long as the Gaelic-speaking aristocracy survived, this learned order was assured of patronage. But beginning with the defeat of the last of the old Gaelic kings, Red Hugh O’Neill, at the Battle of Kinsale (1601), seventeenth-century Ireland suffered a series of catastrophic losses that all but destroyed her native culture. The culminating blow was the departure of the last of the Irish nobility for the Continent – the tragic “Flight of the Wild Geese” – after the battle of the Boyne (1690) and the ensuing Williamite conquest. Now the bards wandered the country, homeless, reduced from places of privilege to near beggary, their collective voice, in the words of John Montague, “a long-drawn-out death song of an order, monotonous in its intensity, like a dog howling after its master.”
The heritage of traditional Irish poetry and music would have disappeared altogether but for the efforts of a group of high-minded patriots who, towards the end of the eighteenth century, were determined to answer claims that the Irish were ignorant, rebellious savages who knew nothing of civilization until English laws, language and manners had been bestowed on them.
In 1792 a circular appeared, calling for an assembly in Belfast of the remaining harpers in order to “revive and perpetuate the ancient Music and Poetry of Ireland.” Only ten musicians answered the call. Of these all but one were well into middle age, and six were blind. The eldest, Denis Hempson, was 97 years of age; the single harper who still plucked the metal strings with long crooked fingernails. This traditional method disappeared because, like everyone else in the Gaelic-speaking countryside, the harpers had become tillers of the soil. Expert transcribers attended the gathering and were expected to record for posterity the body of material that harpers would impart.
Among the transcribers was a young Belfast organist and musicologist named Edward Bunting (1773-1843). Bunting was inspired by the occasion to make the collection of traditional Irish music his life’s work. The first of three collections under Bunting’s name appeared in 1796.
It contained sixty-six harp tunes transcribed for the piano. From this edition may be traced the revival of traditional Irish music which currently enjoys worldwide popularity.
Thomas Moore found in the collections of Bunting one of the chief sources for his Irish Melodies. Indeed, he credited Bunting with having first made him aware of “the beauties of our native music.” Eight of the twelve airs in the first Moore volume are from Bunting’s 1796 collection, and Moore was to provide settings for twenty-six other Bunting transcriptions.
Another inspiration for Moore was the surge of nationalist feeling which, in the wake of the American and French Revolutions, gripped Ireland towards the close of the eighteenth century. The Belfast Harpers Festival was, in fact, closely linked to a radical political society known as the United Irishmen. The United Irishmen sought to win greater freedom for Ireland, particularly through a reform of the Penal Codes enacted a century before that continued to hold Catholics in a state of subservience. Although most of its leaders were Protestants, including Wolfe Tone, the father of Irish Republicanism, the society espoused the ideal of uniting the, by then, two Irish “nations” – Anglo Ireland and Catholic Gaelic Ireland through a common patriotism that transcended their historic divisions. Significantly, the emblem of the United Irishmen was a golden harp on a field of green with the insignia: “It is new strung and it shall be heard.” Thus political reform was integrally related to cultural nationalism, a policy that was to be of increasing importance in Ireland’s struggle for independence.
A further impetus to the development of cultural nationalism was provided by the rage of things Celtic that swept Europe as part of the Romantic movement. The Celtic cult began with the publication in 1762 and 1763 of two volumes of epic poetry claimed by a Scottish schoolmaster named James Macpherson to be direct translations of third century manuscripts devoted to the exploits of the legendary Irish hero Ossian. Macpherson’s “translations” were soon shown to be a forgery. But by that time their watery sentiments had been quoted at length by no less a figure than Goethe in his internationally celebrated novel, Werther.
For a brief period, German scholars went so far as to confuse Celtic with Teutonic material in a search for the mythologie of Germany’s own ancestral Volk. All of these efforts provided a credibility – and an audience for artists like Moore, especially in England where Irish claims to a distinctive national culture had long been denied.
Though a Catholic, and the son of a middle-class grocer, Moore attended Trinity College, Dublin, the bastion of the Anglo-Irish Protestant Ascendancy, but also, during the 1790s, a hotbed of underground revolutionary activity. While at Trinity, Moore came close to being expelled on charges that he was associated with elements plotting armed rebellion.
The charge was, in fact, true; his closest friend at Trinity was Robert Emmet, the dashing leader of a local chapter of the United Irishmen. When Emmet learned that Moore was the author of an anonymous letter to his fellow students arguing that Ireland’s wrongs could only be redressed by threat of physical force, he took the young poet aside to warn him that he risked giving away the position of the rebels.
Open confrontation with England was inevitable and finally occurred in the Rising of 1798, the most concentrated episode of violence in Irish history. The rebellion was brutally suppressed and followed by an Act of Union in 1800 which abolished the Irish Parliament while allowing limited Irish representation at Westminster. Throughout the nineteenth century England’s policy towards Ireland was basically one of forced assimilation within the United Kingdom a policy supported by garrisons of armed soldiers.
For Moore and his fellow patriots these were crushing setbacks. He felt their effect all the more harshly when Robert Emmet led another abortive rebellion in 1803.
Emmet was captured trying to bid farewell to his sweetheart, Sarah Curran, and, after a token trial, condemned to death. Before his execution he delivered a speech from the dock whose ringing challenge was to stir Irish revolutionaries for generations to come: “Let no man write my epitaph. When my country shall have taken her place among the nations of the world, then and only then let my epitaph be written.”
Emmet was taken from the courtroom to be hung, drawn and quartered. Five years later, Moore honored the memory and ideals of his friend in a beautiful lament, “O Breathe Not His Name,” which itself passed into patriotic lore.
Upon graduating from Trinity College in 1799, Moore studied law in London, achieved minor celebrity through the publication of his first book of poems, the mildly salacious Anacreon, and pursued a brief career as a British government official in Bermuda before his taste for lively society brought him back to England in 1804. There he remained for the rest of his life, “negotiating,” as Augustine Martin puts it, “a complex tradition of exile and cunning which went back to Swift and would forward as far as Shaw: that of the Irish political man of letters operating in the courts of the conqueror.”
Moore was not an active revolutionary, but his songs fueled the dying flames of patriotism in early nineteenth century Ireland and evoked a sympathy for the Irish cause throughout the world, including the great houses of England where he was received as an honored guest. Thirty of Moore’s Irish Melodies, are explicitly concerned with Ireland’s political destiny. Far from being, as his detractors claim, “a poet of bland wish fulfillments” whose exploration of the past was but nostalgic escapism, Moore drew upon the historic defeats and suffering of Ireland as a goad to present action. At a time when his fellow countrymen were wallowing in despair, he sought to restore a sense of national pride and purpose by celebrating the heroism of real and legendary figures who had sacrificed their lives in preference to ignominious servility.
There is no doubt that Moore contributed to the heroic martyr tradition that culminated in the 1916 Easter Rising and Ireland’s subsequent political independence.
The basis of that tradition is that there are ideas and ideals worth dying for. Just as truly, the same tradition has fostered a perverse cult of violence which, in its wake, has left a residue of dissension, hatred and terror. Moore, like Yeats a century later, worked to achieve a reconciliation of the various warring factions of Ireland. Both poets believed that Irish unity can ultimately be achieved only through a liberation of the mind and spirit that is the result of tolerance, compassion and mutual understanding.
Moore became the darling of the English “radical chic.” Much more importantly, however, he cast his lot with the suppressed, those alien from the alleged glories of the Glorious Revolution, the Declaration of Rights and the British Constitution. Moore’s Catholic religion deprived him, while the remaining Popery Laws were in force, from the professions, the Army, Parliament or the right to vote. It was an intolerable humiliation, but as an artist without independent means, Moore had to accept patronage where he could find it. His success is astounding when one considers the patriotic tenor of his songs. All the more remarkable, he remained a man of principle. Time and again when patriotism and profit pulled in opposite directions, Moore chose against his own interest.
Realist as well as an idealist, Moore recognized that the past was definitely past, the old order was shattered. But if Ireland as a nation was to survive, the Gaelic culture had to be reclaimed. In an age when powerful forces were seeking to suppress every vestige of that culture, Moore identified himself with it. He thereby prepared the way for the miracle whereby Ireland’s Gaelic heritage was reborn in another tongue through which its bounty could be – and is today – shared with the whole world.
Moore has often been accused of diluting or falsifying his Gaelic sources. Yet, as a lyricist, he introduced into English certain oracular, incantatory and dreamlike sound patterns taken directly from the Gaelic tradition. What he truly wrote were not folk songs but art songs modeled after the amhrán moi, or classical “high songs,” of ancient Ireland. Thus he carried over into English the aristocratic heritage of Gaelic song and poetry.
Although, as we have noted, Moore did not know Irish, his lyrics are remarkably close to Gaelic verse in their techniques of internal rhyming through alliteration and assonance, with a repetition of the same vowel sounds cunningly arranged so that every stressed syllable becomes part of a larger pattern. Examples of this abound in the Melodies. They include the assonantal echo effects of “The Young May Moon” and “I’ve A Secret to Tell Thee,” the long vowels, diphthongs and alliterative effects that capture the languorous ambience of the Celtic Twilight in “How Dear to Me,” and the steady roll of “R” sounds like water rolling in “Silent O Moyle.” Moore thereby established a distinctive note in Anglo-Irish verse that has continued down through James Clarence Mangan and Sir Samuel Ferguson to Yeats, Austin Clarke, Patrick Kavanagh and many contemporary poets.
Gaelic poetry was intended to be sung or chanted. Because of this oral tradition and its influence on Moore, no lyrics in English are more singable than those of the Irish Melodies. Always Moore’s diction is simple and direct, with few polysyllables to trip up the tongue or confuse the ear. Yet within this format he achieved an astonishing range of color by varying, through the use of internal rhyming, the effect of a series of monosyllables, as in the opening lines of “Erin the Tear and the Smile.” Invariably, Moore’s choice of meter and rhythm are perfectly suited to his themes.
Note, for instance, the insistent measured anger of the pentametric cadence of “The Irish Peasant to His Mistress” or the subtle lingering anapests and iambuses that evoke the hypnotic otherworldly mood of “At the Mid Hour of Night.”
In his classic anthology, Songs of the Irish, Donal O’Sullivan provides examples of no less than fifteen categories of subjects employed in the Gaelic song tradition. All but a few can be found in Moore’s Melodies. Over forty Moore songs explore the raptures of romantic love. Others deal with the beauties of nature, the anger of betrayal, the balm of friendship, the sorrows of parting and of old age, the comfort of memory and the loss of those precious cultural values that encompass all the imagination holds dear. Always the perspective is deeply personal — that of a lyric poet who through the power of language wedded to music makes the solitary human predicament universal.
The personal voice of the poet is also felt in Moore’s comic songs of flirtation and drinking through the various guises of a troubadour, droll punster and sometimes errant rake who, at length, chooses to settle down in marital bliss, as did Moore himself. In these playful poses, Moore foreshadows the varied comic personae of James Joyce, James Stephens and Flann O’Brien. Like them, Moore’s frank depiction of sexuality contrasts with the Victorian puritanism evident in late nineteenth century Anglo-Irish and Irish-American love songs with their innocent peasant maidens with snow-white feet and valiant suitors, whose cloying expressions of devotion are only matched by a paralyzing timidity.
Nowhere does one find in Moore the cliched Gaelic terms of belittling endearment– Mavourneen, machree, asthore, alannah – that pass for genuine feeling in so many stage Irish songs of the period. Nor does Moore trivialize the anguish of the emigrant experience by treating Ireland as a sorrowful mother, her offspring far from home but trapped in a prepubescent dream of an impossibly idyllic childhood. Instead, with honesty, directness and often from a non-idealized feminine perspective, Moore explores the very causes as well as pains of exile.
For countless Irish emigrants up to and beyond the Famine, Moore’s Melodies were the closest imaginative link to their homeland. Rooted in the specific details of familiar place names, landscapes and legends as well as the memories of homes and families torn asunder, the songs of Moore anticipated the powerful feelings for Ireland evoked in the work of later Irish writers in exile like Joyce and Sean O’Casey. His songs also instilled in many emigrants a sense of Ireland as an archetypal source of spiritual wholeness, a sanctuary of values that they clung to even as they faced the practical challenges of making a new life in America, England, Australia and Canada.
Moore carried on the mission of the ancient bardic order, for he gave poetic expression to the shared experiences and aspirations of the Irish people scattered throughout the globe. He also anticipated and, indeed, prepared the way for the Irish literary and dramatic movement which, by means of cultural empowerment, enabled the idea of a distinctive Irish identity to survive throughout the swirling changes of the twentieth century. Ironically, by this time Moore’s own work has been dismissed from “the tradition” because, among other things, it possessed the aristocratic qualities of his Gaelic precursors.
In their zeal to create a broadly-based folk culture, many of Moore’s critics tended to confuse the English drawing room audiences for whom he often performed with the actual sentiments of his songs. What they failed to perceive was that it took considerable courage to provide after dinner entertainments that, to a great extent, consisted of battle songs with fierce cries of provocation, revolt and vengeance against the oppressor.
Moore was also rejected because by the middle of the nineteenth century the destruction of the Irish language, coupled with the development of a militantly xenophobic nationalism, led to a different understanding of popular culture than had previously existed in Ireland. To tough-minded patriots on the move, Moore’s art songs, with their classical restraint and symbolic elegance, seemed, in the phrase of Seamus Heaney, “too light, too conciliatory, too colonize.” Still others dismissed Moore, along with the music of the harpers, as “ersatz Irish music intended for an elite coterie.” To compound the irony of this extraordinary misjudgment, the ballad tradition that came into fashion at the time, with its overly didactic political themes and simplistic vocabulary, owed more to English and Scottish than to Irish sources.
Today, however, the renewed interest in more authentic forms of “traditional” Irish music, as advanced by the late Sean O’Riada and such internationally noted ensembles as The Chieftains, has prepared the way for a proper reassessment of Moore’s enormous contribution to Irish and, indeed, world culture.
From the very outset of his endeavor, Moore credited the music of the harpers as being his chief inspiration. At the same time he complained of the “irregular structure,” “the lawless meter” and the “wild and refractory” “harmonies of the airs being published by Bunting and other collectors. He also claimed that many of the airs had been corrupted by the “tasteless decorations of itinerant musicians.” What he hoped to do was correct these “errors” by helping to “restore the regularity of (the melodic) form and the chaste simplicity of its character.”
Moore, all too obviously, was a child of his age. What he could not have known is that many of the airs to which he was most attracted were originally composed, not in major or minor keys, but in ancient modal forms with a five note scale that relates Celtic to Japanese and Chinese music.
While cultivated Western music rests on harmonic pillars that impose rigorous structures on the melody, Irish music written well into the eighteenth century was free of any such formal patterns. Ignoring conventional bar lines and meters, it hovers and expands as freely as a bird in flight.
Moreover, traditional Irish music is linked to the folk music of Asia, Africa and Latin America in the improvisational skills required of performers.
Although a talented performer, Moore did not feel himself qualified to provide accompaniments for the Irish Melodies.
He therefore turned to a fellow Irishman and would-be composer, John Stevenson, to complete the task.
Unfortunately, as Moore himself came to realize, Stevenson destroyed the character of many of the airs with stiff piano accompaniments and florid introductory “symphonies” that owe more to a watered-down Haydn than to anything in the Irish tradition. These now very much dated arrangements have done more than anything else to damage Moore’s reputation, particularly in the eyes of the purists in the field of folk music.
It is worth noting that, despite Moore’s critics, forty-one of the one hundred and twenty-four Irish Melodies, are based upon pre-eighteenth century airs. Among these are some of Moore’s most effective pieces, including “Come Rest on this Bosom,” “Remember the Glories of Brien the Brave,” “Oh, Ye Dead,” “How Dear to Me,” “Come O’er the Sea,” “Oh! Arranmore” and “As Vanquished Erin.” As a performer, Moore did not hesitate to add his own interpolations and even to transform the entire mood of a piece if it suited his purposes. In this, too, he was well within “the tradition.”
Like all successful entertainers, Moore had the gifts of intimacy and sincerity.
Often he was moved to tears by his own songs, and so were his audiences. Servants lined up behind closed doors to hear him, women swooned, wrote him mash notes in verse and treasured locks of his hair.
Accompanying himself at the piano with bare chordal arrangements and in a voice that one admirer compared to “a flute softened to mere breathing,” he held his hearers spellbound.
Moore was the first in a long line of popular poet-performers who combined personal expression with a zeal for political and social reform. To our great grand-parents the Irish Melodies of Thomas Moore were as familiar as the songs of John Lennon today. During the nineteenth century a million and a half copies of the music for “The Last Rose of Summer” were sold in the United States alone.
On his death-bed Thomas Jefferson quoted several lines from “It is Not the Tear at This Moment Shed” in a farewell letter to his daughter. Moore not only belongs in the great line of traditional Irish music, indeed, it was he who first made it known throughout the world. In the process, he created a sympathetic hearing for the Irish claim to independence in England and abroad. Moore’s Irish Melodies were translated into every tongue of Europe, including Hungarian, Polish and Russian, where their passionate yearning for freedom stirred hearts with similar feelings.
John Kennedy once said that “You wouldn’t be Irish if you didn’t know they’d take it away.” Tom Moore gave perfect expression to that quintessentially Irish feeling in the soft strains of sadness and melancholy that cast a shadow on even the most mirthful of his airs. Some of these qualities derive from the modal stales of Irish music. But they also spring from Moore’s own experience of sorrow. Old age was not kind to him. An exile in England, he suffered the loss of each of his five children and also the sting of enmity from his fellow countrymen who, having once idolized him, now condemned Moore as an adopted Irishman whose patriotism was only skin deep.
There is something inherently tragic about cultural attitudes that, for essentially political reasons, deprive a people of important links with their own past. That is what occurred with Moore. For a considerable time it also occurred with Yeats.
Cultural discontinuities are among the more enduring scars of colonization. In rejecting Moore and then Yeats, what was really being discarded by the Irish people was a direct link with the heritage of Gaelic Ireland and through that the spiritual riches of the Celtic world.
No doubt, Moore established certain poetic conventions (“chains” of oppression, “tears” of suffering, the “shadow” of death, the “sword” of valor, the “smile” of freedom, and the “harp” representing Ireland’s national culture) that by the time of Yeats had become platitudes quoted with equally vapid fervor by would-be patriots and poets. That is one reason why Moore was so often parodied in the work of Shaw, Joyce and O’Casey. Yet, as we have seen, Moore could be described in more ways than one as Yeats’ closest intellectual and artistic precursor. Moore obviously lacked the brooding tragic passion of Yeats. But he possessed something that eluded the far greater poet, namely the popular touch.
What this did was enable Moore to provide Irishmen of all classes and creeds with a fuller awareness of their cultural heritage and the value of their struggle for liberty. His songs have rightly been described as the secular hymn-book of Irish nationalism. In the words of Eamon de Valera, hero of the 1916 Easter Rising and Prime Minister of Ireland, “Moore’s songs kept the love of country and lamp of hope burning in millions of Irish hearts in Ireland and in many lands beyond the sea.” Like the minstrel whom he so often invoked as a symbol of liberty, Moore was himself one who sang for the pure and free of all times everywhere.
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